Saturday, June 19, 2010

3/4 left to right camera angle VS Over the Shoulder Shots

Cartoon scenes are most often staged with all the characters looking at each other, each drawn at a 3/4 angle.Does it make sense? When you talk to your friend, do you each look askance at each other, or do you look directly at each other?Good cartoonists like Howie Post can make it look natural - but when Saturday Morning cartoons developed fear and conservatism to the point where everyone was afraid to draw, the ridiculousness of this staging became completely apparent.

IGNORANT

If we were to make literal sense, we would stage the characters in profile and have them looking directly at each other, but there is a rule against that in film.

PROFILE 2 SHOTS(I'm not sure why, but I know how we love to obey arbitrary rules.)...maybe because 2 profiles facing each other can look very mechanical. It's also hard to get a lot of expression out of perfect profiles. ...if you wanted to have your characters make expressions...It is possible to get some dynamism and asymmetry into profile 2 shots, as Owen Fitzgerald demonstrates,OVER-THE-SHOULDER STAGINGIn live action, they have solved the problem by using over the shoulder shots (which is also an unnatural way to view a conversation-but we have gotten used to seeing it and accept it).The over the shoulder shot doesn't work well in animation though - partly because many cartoon characters don't have shoulders - but mostly because it's hard to draw the back of a cartoon character and make it look good.Saturday morning cartoons loved over the shoulder shots, I think partly because they don't work in cartoons- and anything that doesn't work well in cartoons has to be used - to relieve the shame of having to work in cartoons.You can see how awkward it is to draw -let alone animate - let alone get some acting out of this angle.DIC really loved awkward camera angles that they themselves couldn't draw. I remember they would get mad if you staged anything where the characters might actually end up looking good in the shots. They purposely wanted every shot from an angle that no one could draw- just to guarantee that the finished cartoon would look awful. -I wish I could find some examples online, but no luck so far...wait! here we go! - thanks to Oliver and drawingtherightway...

Here's Owen making it look easy again.He's one of the rare cartoonists who can make things look good from any angle.Rotating a 3/4 (above) to fake an upshot-VS actually drawing the head tilted up and back (below)A good rule of thumb for animation staging: if it's hard to draw one drawing from a certain angle - it will be at least 12 times as hard to animate it.

24 comments:

I couldn't tell the Hanna-Barbera stuff apart from the Filmation and DIC images in the same post! A very sad state that animation went through in the 1970s and 80s. The 90s Disney drawings look slightly better drawn, but still had the cold feeling that those other cels had. Even after those two decades were over, you still find the influence from those awful cartoons in a lot of animation from the 90s.

Vertigo is an amazing movie, in my opinion, John. Glad you included the framegrab in this post. Hitchcock seems to have an uncanny talent for complex camera angles, yet never goes over the top with them. He uses them to simply tell the stories his characters were going through.

Boy, that post was great, and it really made me think. These happen to be my favorite kinds of posts.

Notice how in the Dennis/Mr. Wilson and Dennis/Margaret panels, Fitzgerald seems to be using pure profiles to heighten the impact of what is a confrontation between two characters, as opposed to just a conversation.

I suspect the 3/4 rule originated in theater acting, where the actors want their faces to be seen and yet appear to be conversing with one another. and split the different with the 3/4 "open position" stance. But even in theater, they try to break it up so at times we the audience effectively get over-the shoulder shots and full-front shots, by having the actors look upstage or out into the audience toward the "fourth wall." In cartoons and comics, though, we should have no excuse for only using 2 or three angles for drawing characters. We ought to be able to draw from any perspective (as long as it supports the story point being illustrated, of course).

"Saturday morning cartoons loved over the shoulder shots, I think partly because they don't work in cartoons- and anything that doesn't work well in cartoons has to be used - to relieve the shame of having to work in cartoons."

Did it's explain the re-use of many scenes in a lot of Saturday Mornings Cartoons? I seen that in every old Spider-Man and Rocket Robin Hood episodes. It's like the peoples in charge to the production never understand what really means put two characters in a disucssion correctly.

Your posts start to reach the little guy of country on me with his crude drawings to wanting to experiment what you sharing. I knowcit will takes years of experience to reach this goal in drawing but i promise to do my possible to be more stronger and more in confidence to myself and the others. Thanks so much! They never teach me that in Drawings class.

Are you just advising to stay away from over the shoulder shots in animation for conversation? What about over the shoulder where character is not moving (or kept to a minimum) to establish a shot, or show the other character moving?

Having seen many of those series when I was a child, think that the DIC stuff is a bit more watcheable than what Filmation and H-B produced at the time.

The problem is that it's one thing to look at the drawings, but another to endure the tedious and utterly forgettable scripts all of those series had. So when John bashes "Cartoon Writers", I wholeheartedly agree with him. Those were, IMHO, the biggest plague which infested 70s and 80s cartoons.

JohnK, Do you think if we work hard enough maybe we might be able to animate those difficult shots? cause even if DIC did it badly, that means it can be done to some extent, so maybe someone good enough can get it to work?

Wow, that Dale character definitely looks like a plastic Barbie doll where there's an invisible hand moving it just slightly. In matter of fact, this applies to almost any cartoons after the 60's. Everything just looks like dolls. So that's what lifeless looks like!

I don't like Hitchcock's shot/reverse shot style. In a lot of old movies every character would face more or less in the direction of the camera, and you saw more things shot in two shots, and with long takes. In a lot of Howard Hawks films one character will have a his back to another character completely and will only turn and face someone to punctuate a story point. I like that for some reason. To me that kind of staging works better for animation than anything else you've mentioned, because it focuses on the performance of the character/animator and the graphic design of the frame rather than on cutting. It's more like a musical.

It's hard to see examples of this, but you see it all over a film like "Rock, Rock. Rock" where you can clearly see Tuesday Weld reading cuecards.

Howdy, there, Mr. K. This is completely unrelated to the post, but I couldn't find a 'contact' button. It's a cute little Disney ditty about Mickey and Goofy getting hopped up on speed and then going to Africa to turn a buck on that happy-stuff.http://all-thats-interesting.tumblr.com/post/706923431/mickey-mouse-becomes-a-speed-dealer